Improve emotional intelligence with creative team building
At MSP Teambuilding, we know how beneficial it is to have employees with high emotional intelligence (EI). In fact, studies have shown that people with high EI enjoy better mental health, have a better job performance and have superior leadership skills. But what is emotional intelligence? It’s an individual’s ability to:
- Recognize their own emotions and those of others
- Use emotional information to guide their thinking and behaviour
- Adjust their set of emotions in order to adapt to situations or to reach specific goals
Moreover, according to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and science journalist, there are 5 components to emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. You’re probably wondering, “how can team building activities help me improve emotional intelligence in the workplace?”. Well, the better you are at managing those components, the higher your EI. And a way for you to learn to manage those components is through team building activities.
Not just any activity
Not every team building activity can help you improve your EI. As previously stated, it has to be an activity that forces you to manage or become aware of one or many of the EI components.
A challenging activity like, Innovation That Rhymes, is a great way to improve social skills. In this activity, you have to rewrite the lyrics of a song with a team of colleagues with whom you may not often work with. It will help you improve your collaboration at the workplace and create fun memories with colleagues. You’ll always remember that time where you, Isabelle, David and John had to find a word or group of words that rhyme with ‘collaboration’. Right!?
Learning to trust your teammates with an activity like Mosaic Vision is another great way to develop your EI. In this activity, participants must create a mosaic (many small canvases that will make up one larger artwork) as a team. Just like in the workplace, it can be scary to have to trust your teammates to do a specific part of a project. Everyone envisions and values things differently. The key is for you to learn to self-regulate your emotions, let go of your fears and learn to trust your team.
Proper support and guidance
A team building activity that successfully promotes emotional intelligence also requires the support and guidance of a trained facilitator. Among other things, this person is there to remind you to take a moment to reflect on how you’re feeling throughout the activity. This exercise helps you practice your self-awareness.
The facilitator also encourages you to put yourself in your teammates’ shoes and imagine how they might be feeling. This, in turn, is a way to help you practice your empathy. For example, imagine each participant standing in front of the group alone and introducing themselves. You already know that David is a shy and introverted person, so can you imagine how he must feel having to speak in front of a group of people? Exactly!
Conclusion
We’ve learned that emotional intelligence is comprised of 5 separate components: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. In order to learn to manage these components and as a result improve EI through team building activities, you must carefully choose crafted activities. Furthermore, if you want to get something out of the experience, it must be led by a professional team of facilitators specialised in creative team building activities.
Have you had any great team building activity experiences that helped nurture your emotional intelligence? We’d love to hear about it!
